


Music Box

by moonlit_wings



Category: Strange Magic (2015)
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Artificial Intelligence, Gen, Science Fiction, Short, Strange Magic Week 2016, implied artificial intelligence, inventors and inventions, magic music (implied), music box
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-21
Updated: 2016-08-21
Packaged: 2018-08-09 16:37:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 508
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7809271
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moonlit_wings/pseuds/moonlit_wings
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hoping to win patronage from the Fairy Kingdom’s royal family, a brownie inventor builds an astonishing device – an instrument that can play itself!</p>
            </blockquote>





	Music Box

**Author's Note:**

> _Strange Magic Week_ is a tumblr event, which this year lasts from Monday August 15th to Sunday August 21st. The challenges/prompts are as follows:
> 
> 1\. Fairy Tale of creator's choice AU
> 
> 2\. Wedding/Arranged Marriage
> 
> 3\. Tiny People in Jars
> 
> 4\. Dark Fantasy AU
> 
> 5\. Role Reversal
> 
> 6\. Babies/Next Generation
> 
> 7\. SciFi AU

It looked like a hybrid between a piano and a waterwheel. She would find a way to streamline the design later. Aesthetics could be addressed after she got it to work.

Louise took a deep breath and turned the key three times.

Carefully calibrated clockwork ticked. The wheel began to turn. The first peg hit the piano key …

_Ting!_

It was a single note, but it was in tune!

_Ting! Ting-Ting! Ting! Ting-ting-ting! Ting!_

It was a simple song and a popular one; a children's lullaby so old no one knew who had written it. It was said the music one could make was an expression of one's soul. Louise had chosen something she hoped would help everyone love her machine as much as she did.

All those months of work, the careful budgeting to gather the right materials and tools, the sour notes, the broken springs flying at her eyes, her sleepless nights calculating and recalculating _what went wrong, how do I make it right_ , all of that was worth it for this golden moment! Her invention was a success!

Louise hugged one of the non-moving parts of her beautiful machine. She'd have to get glass or a cabinet to cover the moving parts. It would be terrible to jolt a cog out of place, or get her coppery fur caught in the mechanism. Perhaps the covering could act as a sound box and make it louder.

She would need to create more wheels to play different songs, and arrange an easy exchange of wheels. She ought to make it look more elegant before presenting it to the royal family, too – Princess Marianne was usually casual, even more so now that she was spending so much time amongst goblins, but most fairies were finicky about appearances. And Louise should probably put wheels on the bottom of the next version as well, so it could be moved. This prototype, her proof of concept, would be living in her workshop.

But she had done it! Louise had created a device that could produce music with neither musician nor magical aid! Even someone clumsy and half-deaf and near-powerless could have music in their homes with which to welcome guests. Louise would go down in history as the brownie who changed the world.

"I'm so proud of you," she told her invention and herself.

Lulled by her late nights of work and the soothing song, Louise settled down on her cot. She'd set up a bedroom nook right in her workroom for those times she was too tired to head upstairs.

The device continued to play after she'd fallen asleep. Maybe, just maybe, the music lasted a bit longer it should have …

Perhaps she'd wound the key just a hair too far and the spring needed to finish its release. Perhaps some of the gears weren't the right size after all, and turned the wheel more times than had been intended.

It hardly mattered. No one was there to hear except the inventor and her invention, and the inventor was asleep.

**Author's Note:**

> In a world of ever-singing magical beings, it seems logical for a music box to be equivalent to an A.I.
> 
> No one knows for sure who invented the first music box in our world, but one of the candidates was an 18-century Swiss watchmaker name Louis Favre, after whom I named Louise.
> 
> A slice of virtual lemon meringue pie to anyone who, from the beat alone, can guess which song the music box plays.


End file.
